The following article is a review of the seminal publication of James B. Harrod, Director of the Center for Research on the Origins of Art and Religion, in MOTHER TONGUE, Journal of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory • Issue XIX • 2014, republished on Academia.edu in June 2022
The 200,000-Year Evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens
Language and Myth Families based on the mtDNA
Phylotree, Fossil mtDNA and Archaeology: A Thought Experiment
James Harrod’s Abstract. A meta-pattern-analysis of the mitochondrial DNA phylotree and current distribution of language families indicates that over the last 200,000 years there are robust correspondences between mtDNA haplogroups and language macrofamilies. This study is a thought experiment, a top-down derivation of the Homo sapiens sapiens (‘Proto-Human’, ‘Proto-World’) language phylotree, which can be tested against bottom-up prehistoric linguistic reconstructions. It establishes a relative chronology for dating the emergence and branching of the global array of…
